The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel Baroness Orczy (free reads .TXT) 📖

not even a cat could manage to slip. Oh! the prisoner was well guarded! The citizen Representative need, of a truth, have no fear! Three or four men⁠—of the best and most trustworthy⁠—had not left the guardroom since the morning. He himself (Hébert) had kept the accursed Englishman in sight all night, had personally conveyed him to the Abbaye, and had only left the guardroom a moment ago in order to speak with the citizen Representative. He was going back now at once, and would not move until the order came for the prisoner to be conveyed to the Court of Justice and thence to summary execution.

For the nonce, Hébert concluded with a complacent chuckle, the Englishman was still crouching dejectedly in a corner of his new cell, with little of him visible save that naked shoulder through his torn shirt, which, in the process of transference from one prison to another, had become a shade more grimy than before.

Chauvelin nodded, well satisfied. He commended Hébert for his zeal, rejoiced with him over the inevitable triumph. It would be well to avenge that awful humiliation at Calais last September. Nevertheless, he felt anxious and nervy; he could not comprehend the apathy assumed by the factitious Molé. That the apathy was assumed Chauvelin was keen enough to guess. What it portended he could not conjecture. But that the Englishman would make a desperate attempt at escape was, of course, a foregone conclusion. It rested with Hébert and a guard that could neither be bribed nor fooled into treachery, to see that such an attempt remained abortive.

What, however, had puzzled citizen Chauvelin all along was the motive which had induced Sir Percy Blakeney to play the role of menial to Jean Paul Marat. Behind it there lay, undoubtedly, one of those subtle intrigues for which that insolent Scarlet Pimpernel was famous; and with it was associated an attempt at theft upon the murdered body of the demagogue⁠ ⁠… an attempt which had failed, seeing that the supposititious Paul Molé had been searched and nothing suspicious been found upon his person.

Nevertheless, thoughts of that attempted theft disturbed Chauvelin’s equanimity. The old legend of the crumpled roseleaf was applicable in his case. Something of his intense satisfaction would pale if this final enterprise of the audacious adventurer were to be brought to a triumphant close in the end.

VII

That same forenoon, on his return from the Abbaye and the depot, Chauvelin found that a visitor was waiting for him. A woman, who gave her name as Jeannette Maréchal, desired to speak with the citizen Representative. Chauvelin knew the woman as his colleague Marat’s maid-of-all-work, and he gave orders that she should be admitted at once.

Jeannette Maréchal, tearful and not a little frightened, assured the citizen Representative that her errand was urgent. Her late employer had so few friends; she did not know to whom to turn until she bethought herself of citizen Chauvelin. It took him some little time to disentangle the tangible facts out of the woman’s voluble narrative. At first the words: “Child⁠ ⁠… Chemin de Pantin⁠ ⁠… Leridan,” were only a medley of sounds which conveyed no meaning to his ear. But when occasion demanded, citizen Chauvelin was capable of infinite patience. Gradually he understood what the woman was driving at.

“The child, citizen!” she reiterated excitedly. “What’s to be done about him? I know that citizen Marat would have wished⁠—”

“Never mind now what citizen Marat would have wished,” Chauvelin broke in quietly. “Tell me first who this child is.”

“I do not know, citizen,” she replied.

“How do you mean, you do not know? Then I pray you, citizeness, what is all this pother about?”

“About the child, citizen,” reiterated Jeannette obstinately.

“What child?”

“The child whom citizen Marat adopted last year and kept at that awful house on the Chemin de Pantin.”

“I did not know citizen Marat had adopted a child,” remarked Chauvelin thoughtfully.

“No one knew,” she rejoined. “Not even citizeness Evrard. I was the only one who knew. I had to go and see the child once every month. It was a wretched, miserable brat,” the woman went on, her shrivelled old breast vaguely stirred, mayhap, by some atrophied feeling of motherhood. “More than half-starved⁠ ⁠… and the look in its eyes, citizen! It was enough to make you cry! I could see by his poor little emaciated body and his nice little hands and feet that he ought never to have been put in that awful house, where⁠—”

She paused, and that quick look of furtive terror, which was so often to be met with in the eyes of the timid these days, crept into her wrinkled face.

“Well, citizeness,” Chauvelin rejoined quietly, “why don’t you proceed? That awful house, you were saying. Where and what is that awful house of which you speak?”

“The place kept by citizen Leridan, just by Bassin de l’Ourcq,” the woman murmured. “You know it, citizen.”

Chauvelin nodded. He was beginning to understand.

“Well, now, tell me,” he said, with that bland patience which had so oft served him in good stead in his unavowable profession. “Tell me. Last year citizen Marat adopted⁠—we’ll say adopted⁠—a child, whom he placed in the Leridans’ house on the Pantin road. Is that correct?”

“That is just how it is, citizen. And I⁠—”

“One moment,” he broke in somewhat more sternly, as the woman’s garrulity was getting on his nerves. “As you say, I know the Leridans’ house. I have had cause to send children there myself. Children of aristos or of fat bourgeois, whom it was our duty to turn into good citizens. They are not pampered there, I imagine,” he went on drily; “and if citizen Marat sent his⁠—er⁠—adopted son there, it was not with a view to having him brought up as an aristo, what?”

“The child was not to be brought up at all,” the woman said gruffly. “I have often heard citizen Marat say that he hoped the brat would prove a thief when he grew up, and would take to alcoholism like a duck